The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Sexuality and Gender in the Office

This newest addition to the series Society and the Sexes in the Modern World, edited by Christine Stansell, is a fascinating history of Americans’ beliefs about sexuality and gender in the white-collar workplace from the mid-nineteenth century to the current day. Richly woven with the stories about women office workers, Julie Berebitsky’s book chronicles in absorbing detail the contradictory narratives of sex in the office, from stories of sexually powerful women tempting vulnerable men, to innocent women in need of protection from predatory, older men. Berebitsky describes the development of the “sexualized office in Americans’ shared imagination” (p. 9) through visual and print media, in mainstream and professional periodicals and prescriptive literature, in confession magazines, erotic pulp fiction, Playboy and popular film, and in cartoons, postcards, and magazine advertisements (some of which are reproduced in the book). Through a close analysis of these stories, commentaries, and images, Berebitsky argues that sexuality constructed gender in the office and was one way in which “power and authority in the office were created, negotiated, expressed, and challenged” (p. 16). She demonstrates how economic and political as well as intellectual and cultural developments influenced Americans’ understandings of sexuality in the office, but she concludes that Americans’ attitudes toward workplace sexuality have remained startlingly consistent over time.

Women first began working in offices during the Civil War, and their number grew steadily over time, from fewer than 2,000 in 1870 to 70,000 in 1891, and to half a million in 1920. By 1950, at 5.25 million, office workers made up a third of all workingwomen. As women entered office work, competing narratives emerged about them and the men they encountered. Appearing regularly in newspapers by the late nineteenth century, reports of office sex scandals often involved young unmarried women working for older, established married men. Public discourses portrayed the woman office worker alternatively as an “unfeeling vamp who made a fool out of a man and mincemeat of his marriage,” as a “vulnerable victim of either a lecherous man or his vindictive wife, who blamed her marital troubles on her husband’s office help,” or as “a new kind of women, a moral and strong-minded individual capable of protecting (or at least standing up for) herself, even in public” (p. 22). On the other hand, the male boss was also portrayed in contradictory ways, as a “victim of his base desires, a sexual predator willing to exploit his position of authority, or a gentleman who had failed in his role as protector of female innocence” (p. 23). Underlying these debates were anxieties about women’s sexual nature and individual agency at a time of increasing female workforce participation, changing gender roles, and evolution of ideas about marriage. Office workers and their advocates laid claim to the middle-class ideology of female passionlessness, virtue, and respectability, whereas others thought women capable of sexual deceit and believed in men’s defenselessness when faced with an alluring young woman. However, there was general agreement that the gender-integrated workplace was a dangerous place, that men’s sexual passions were inevitable, and that women were responsible for controlling sexuality in the office.

A major theme of Berebitsky’s book is how sexuality constructed gender in the workplace. She argues that “sexuality has been a signifier for all aspects of masculinity and femininity, a way of picturing and maintaining gender difference—and possibly gender hierarchy—even as women entered into men’s world, took up men’s jobs, and acquired some of men’s power” (pp. 252–53). In a particularly interesting chapter, Berebitsky argues that sexuality in the office played a key role in counteracting the emasculating effect of white-collar office work for men. In constructing a new “white collar masculinity,” men used sexual behaviors toward their female coworkers to claim a type of manly success when other markers...